Hillcrest had the ball. The run-back had been wonderful, but, after that for a time, things were not so good. Johnny saw at a glance that the Hillcrest team was outweighed fifteen pounds to the man. And, in the beginning games at least, weight does count.
Hillcrest tried a smash through right tackle. No good. They attempted an end run with Ballard carrying the ball. Johnny caught his breath as he saw the mountain boy tuck the ball under his arm. “First blood,” he muttered. Two enemies broke through the line. Ballard dodged one, appeared to offer the ball to the second, then pivoted and faded out to the right.
In the end, however, the mountain boy was thrown for a loss of two yards. One more down, then came the punt.
A Cedarville man carried the ball to his own forty yard line. Then followed a terrific pounding of the Hillcrest line that resulted in four first downs, a thirty yard run through the line and at last a touchdown by the invaders.
“Oh!” Jensie sighed, it was the first real game she had ever witnessed. “How can we win when they ram the line like a flock of goats?”
“Or rams?” Johnny chuckled in spite of himself. “But wait,” he consoled her, “our team will take to the air. Then you’ll see.”
“We’ll have to beat them with passes,” Johnny explained.
He looked at the girl beside him and marvelled. From his strange introduction—or lack of introduction—back there in the mountain pool, he had suspected her of being a trifle crude. To his vast surprise, he had found her very much of a lady.
As he thought of it now, while Cedarville took time out before a try at the goal, as he recalled the few happy days spent with her there in the mountains, he found himself thinking of her as he might have thought of the fine type of English girl, who rides after the hounds, plays golf, cricket, and tennis, and is a fine-spoken, properly dressed young person for all that.
Ride after the hounds? Well, they had not quite done that. They had followed the Colonel’s favorite hounds over the ridges, hunting squirrels. They had risen two hours before dawn to walk through the dewy moonlight to a cornfield. There they had treed two fat, marauding old coons and had, as Jensie put it, “Shot them at sunrise.” They had—